Naturally Dyed & Quilted Pillow Covers

Just a quick post here to share some pictures of the throw pillows I made for my couch. The monochromatic yellow on yellow comes from ground pomegranate rinds (I shared this dye project with you here). The cotton Sashiko thread dyed a couple shades lighter then the linen fabric so the running stitches on the pillow still stand out, and I'm really happy with the texture that the stitches give as well. These were pretty easy to make construction-wise, but the running stitches did take ages and I like to hand finish my binding as well.

I wanted to make two pillows so altogether I needed four squares of quilted fabric. For each quilted square I cut a piece of cotton muslin, a piece of cotton batting and a piece of the dyed yellow fabric, then I quilt those three layers together with the cotton Sashiko thread. Two quilted squares are sewn together along three sides, and then I bound all raw edges with straight-cut binding. The pillows are closed with sew-on snaps along the side that was not sewn together, that way the pillow inserts can be removed and the covers can be washed. Since taking these photos they've been washed and because all the fabrics used were pre-washed the pillow covers washed beautifully.

Autumn Dye Day: Pomegranate Rinds

This season I made just one quick dye bath. I was looking for a light yellow to make some new linen pillow covers for my couch throw pillows, and I wanted to learn about a dye that I hadn’t worked with yet while I was trying to get to that colour.

I bought the dried and ground pomegranate rinds from Maiwa Supply (available here). I’ve seen others do this with fresh rinds, which I might play with in the future, but for now the ground rinds seemed like a better way to get consistent colour that wouldn’t be too light. I’m also already saving up avocado skins in my freezer and dried onion skins on my counter and I only have so much space for dye scraps in my little apartment!

I was dying both cellulose (linen & cotton) and protein (silk) fibres this time so I went through the separate scouring and mordanting processes given by Maiwa (available here) for the two different types of fibres. Both types were mordanted with alum at 15% weight of fabric. I made my pomegranate dye bath with the dye stuff measured at 10% weight of fabric. After about 1 hour I took out everything from the bath and added a 1/2 tsp of iron directly to the bath. After mixing that in I added back the fibres that I wanted to be a darker green/grey colour and rinsed everything else. After I had the colour I wanted from the iron bath I rinsed everything and followed the rest of the instructions from Maiwa (I let my fibres rest 2 weeks before washing with soap).

The colours turned out beautiful, although the yellows have more of a mustard coloured tone than I expected. The cotton sashiko thread I dyed I’m going to use to hand quilt the linen for my cushion covers, and the two silks will hopefully become some really luxurious linings for a couple winter skirts I’m working on sewing.

Summer Dye Experiments: Sequoia, Madder, Marigold & Cutch

With this batch of natural dye experiments I wanted to finish with more than a pile of colourful swatches and trims to add to my stash, so I decided the theme of this dye weekend would be to make a table setting for a late summer dinner party. I thought along side that I could make a set of tea towels for the kitchen, and the napkins I made would be a smaller "everyday" style napkin that could be used instead of paper napkins when eating all of our meals at home. So a table cloth, tea towels, and napkins was the plan, and of course a pile of swatches to add to my stash because why not throw any extra bits of fabric in when you have the dye pot going.

So before I even got started with the dyeing I had to make the things I wanted to dye. The table cloth I made by hemming two large pieces of linen and then adding buttons and buttonholes, which allowed the pole of our umbrella to come up through the two pieces. And then 16 tea towels and 16 napkins took me a couple weeks to finish, following the metered corner tutorial from Purl Soho (link to tutorial at the end of this post).

I made 4 dye pots, as always following the free instructions from Maiwa as closely as I could. Below WOF is an abbreviation for "weight of fabric", which is how dye stuff is measured when natural dying.

Cutch:

Measured at 30% WOF. No tannin is needed for cutch so I just scoured the fibres and mordanted with alum at 15% WOF, then a second alum mordant at 10% WOF. The table cloth went into this dye bath and it made such a beautiful brown. This is the dye from this summer that I am most looking forward to learning more about in the future, as there are so many ways to shift the colour by adding things to the dye bath as you work.

Cutch & Madder:

Cutch was measured at 45% WOF and Madder at 15% WOF. No tannin is needed for cutch so again I scoured the fibres and mordanted with alum at 15% WOF, then a second alum mordant at 10% WOF. I was hoping for a deep rust colour, and I like the reddish brown that I got but I'm still going to work towards a more perfect rust colour.

Marigold & Madder:

Marigold measured at 45% WOF and Madder at 10% WOF. I scoured fibres, applied tannin at 10% WOF, mordanted with alum at 15% WOF, then again with alum at 10% WOF. This combination of dyes was just perfect, it made for an orangey gold colour and it's just so vibrant. One day I'll have a garden full of marigolds so that I can harvest and dry my own dye stuff, and dye all of my belongings gold.

Sequoia:

Measured at 10% WOF. I scoured fibres, applied tannin at 10% WOF, mordanted with alum at 15% WOF, then again with alum at 10% WOF. Sequoia is a dye with moderate lightfastness, which means it will fade if left in the sun. I do like the purple grey colour but I think I could achieve a similar colour using other more lightfast dyes with iron. I was expecting more of a wine colour so maybe I'll have to play with this one again, but probably at a higher WOF percent.

I took a couple pictures of everything put together on our patio, and of course made a couple new pages for my dye swatch book.

Pattern for mitred corner table linens: Purl Soho

Dye Supplies: Maiwa Natural Dyes

Linen I used: 140g/sm white linen

Natural Dye Instructions I use: Maiwa Guide to Natural Dyes

Drafting a Button-up Skirt Pattern

If you read my previous post you'll know how excited I've been about natural dyes this year. I just dyed a meter of lightweight linen a beautiful mottled olive green colour (read about that here), and I'm going to be sewing a skirt out of it. This is going to be a pretty big and consuming project, the dying itself takes lots of time and patience, and I'm also going to be doing an all-over embroidery design on the skirt. I'm thinking embroidered olive branches on an olive coloured skirt. So before I start on weeks, months, maybe years of embroidery, I want to have the perfect pattern.

I'll be thread basting these pattern pieces onto my meter of fabric, and then only embroidering within the thread basted lines. There will be no wasted embroidery and nothing will get cut off by seams this way.

I've been really inspired by vintage clothing lately, and I love the look of buttons running up the front of a garment. I decided I want this skirt to be a button-up skirt that hits just below my knees, and something high waisted that I can tuck a light blouse into will work really well with my wardrobe. I considered buying a sewing pattern as I usually do, but since I knew I would be making a mock-up of that pattern anyways (I want the fit of this to be perfect!) I thought that this would be a good time to try drafting my own pattern. Plus I'm currently in isolation so I have plenty of time to make mistakes and do things over and over until I'm happy with the pattern.

There are many different ways to draft a pattern and because the skirt I'll be making is so simple I decided to use the method of tracing something that fits you well to get the basic shapes. I also have to keep in mind that I only have 1 meter of the olive green fabric. To make this skirt fit on the final fabric I'm going to have to cut the skirt on the cross grain (instead of the straight). Usually patterns are cut on the straight grain because it is the strongest, but I don't mind this skirt having some extra drape (maybe it will give it the slight feel of a bias cut skirt? We will see). I also can't cut the back of this skirt in one large piece. I'm breaking it up into 4 pieces by adding a seam down centre back and adding a triangle yoke to just the back of the skirt. So to start I traced the shape of a skirt that fits me well in the waist. I then traced the bottom half of another skirt that I like the drape and length of and I put those two shapes together, added a 1/2" seam allowance, et voila! A mediocre fitting skirt.

These drawings are just a rough visual of what I was doing, they are not a pattern!

But in all honesty I was pretty happy at this point. I hadn't made a perfect thing but I had made a thing, and I could see where I needed to go to improve. The main things I noticed here is that the skirt does not drape as much as I want (it holds it's a-line shape), but the lightweight linen I'll be using has so much more drape than the cotton that I'm making the mock-up out of so that's a problem that will solve itself.

The second thing is all the extra fabric at my lower back! I've heard that many people have a "swayback", which is basically described as a dip at your lower back, and looking at this fabric I'm thinking that that's what I have. So I pinched the extra fabric horizontally, and pinned it down. Then I traced the fabric that I wanted removed onto the pattern piece, cut that slit out, and taped the piece back together. This was such a simple fix and I'm looking forward to using it in the future to alter patterns and store-bought clothes.

The last thing that needed to be fixed was that the skirt felt tight around my lower hips and upper thighs. Again a simple fix, I used a pencil to mark lines on the side seams where the skirt started feeling tight (I double checked this sitting down in the skirt), and then I transferred that line to the paper pattern piece. I didn't need too much more ease so I only extended the seam out 1/4" from where it was, which gives me a total of 1" extra room (because I made this adjustment to both the front and back pieces on both side seams).

Again, this is picture is not to scale, just an idea of what I did.

I made nice new copies of all my pattern pieces and then used these to cut out a second mock-up to check my fit. I feel that this one is perfect! I've never had a skirt fit the shape of my hips so well, and this is going to be the pattern I go with fo my olive skirt project. I finished the mock-up with buttons and buttonholes, and a snap closure at the waistband, which is what I’ll be using on the final skirt. I’ll keep this mock-up around for reference while I embroider and sew the olive skirt, and then the hardware will be harvested for future mock-ups. The fabric will be re-used for more mock-ups until the pieces are so small that they become stuffing (I’m thinking of doing a set of bolster pillows once I have enough fabric scraps).

Read about my last all-over embroidered project here.

Experimenting with Natural Dyes: Osage, Cutch, and Logwood

For this second natural dye session I decided to try making multiple dye baths so that I could do one large batch of scouring and mordanting, and then split the fabrics and fibres up into multiple different dyes. I chose 3 dyes that I was interested in trying out without putting much thought into how those colours would work together. Which of course is completely unnecessary, but I think to make photographing everything more fun I will choose a colour palette or theme for my next batch of colours.

I tend to like more muted tones so I was looking forward to experimenting with adding iron to my dye baths. I wanted to see each of the dye baths before and after adding iron, and make some pages for my swatch book with all my results. These experiments are just for fun and learning, so I'm not too picky about the outcomes of the colours. I did dye a couple larger pieces of linen and hemp that I can make garments from, but mostly I just dyed scraps of linen (for quilts and small zippered pouches), and scraps of yarn, ribbon, and embroidery thread. I try to use a mix of materials like linen, cotton, silk, velvet, and wool so I can see how the dye changes on different bases.

The three dyes I would be working with this time are osage sawdust, cutch powder, and logwood chips, all from Maiwa Supply. This post is not intended to be instructional, I just want to share my experience with the dyes, and I recommend following the instructional PDF that Maiwa offers if you want to follow along. Maiwa also just launched a new natural dye website which is another excellent resource. I try to follow their instructions as best as I can here.

I scoured and mordanted all of my materials first (following the appropriate directions for cellulose and protein fibres). For mordanting, all of my protein fibres were done with alum, and all of my cellulose fibres had a tannin applied (gallnut), then an alum mordant, and then a 2nd alum mordant. Of the 3 dyes I used, cutch does not actually require a tannin (it naturally contains its own tannins), but I applied it anyways because I wanted to keep everything in one big batch. I only have 1 pot dedicated to dying at the moment (and you don't want to mix dye pots with kitchen pots), so the scouring and mordanting process is very time consuming for me, as I do every thing one step at a time. Having 1 pot means I also have nowhere to strain my dye bath into, so most of my dyeing is done with the dyestuff still in the water, which I think is contributing to my splotchy colours. I'm really looking forward to isolation being over so I can start keeping a look out for large pots at thrift shops.

The first dye I played with was osage. I was looking for an olive green for an upcoming skirt project so I decided to go with osage, which produces a warm yellow, and then add iron to change the colour to olive green. I first dyed a small piece of linen in just the osage to learn about the colour that osage gives on it's own (a very warm and vibrant yellow), and then I added the iron directly to the dye pot. I am so in love with the olive green colour that I got from this. I also have read that over-dying the osage yellow fabric with indigo will produce a teal or emerald green, so I will save some of this yellow fabric for an indigo dip. I've taken an indigo dying workshop in the past so I'm excited to start experimenting with blues this summer.

The next dye was cutch. Cutch is supposed to make a toffee brown, and with iron it should be a more chocolate brown. I was looking for a more chocolate colour so I immediately added iron to the bath. I regret not dying a scrap of linen first before the iron, to see what that toffee colour would have been! I also thought I added too much iron, as my fabric turned a dark charcoal colour almost immediately. Although this was one of the dyes that I found changed over the next couple weeks as the colour "set in".

My last dye was logwood chips. This dye seems to have so much potential, especially when over-dying or under-dying with other colours. My goal was a lavender purple, so I started with 10% dye stuff to WOF (weight of fabric) thinking it would get me a light shade. I let the logwood chips soak in water for 12 hours, and then boiled them to make my bath, and it was so much stronger than I expected. The first couple pieces I put in turned a very deep purple right away, so before putting the rest of the fibre in I discarded about 80% of the bath, watered down the remainder and tried again. I added a very small amount of iron (learning from the cutch experiment the day before), and got a pretty muted purple, still not quite as light as I was hoping but much closer to my goal. You can save the logwood chips and re-use them for a lighter dye bath, so I dried mine out and will use them again for what I'm hoping will be a very light lavender.

After dying you give all of your fibres a good rinse and then let them hang to dry. Here it is suggested that you let the fibres rest for two weeks to let the colours set into the fibre before you wash with soap. Natural dying is such a lesson in patience, and waiting the two weeks before I can use the fibres makes it feel a little like Christmas in a way. After the final wash I found that a lot of the vibrancy from the osage washed out. Which meant the olive green was a little more grey toned than it looked before washing. I also felt like the colour of the cloth dyed with cutch changed a lot after it was washed, from charcoal to more of a brown tone. Before washing the cutch cloth was my least favourite of the bunch but after washing it is the colour I am most excited about!

One interesting thing was seeing how different the colour showed up on different fibres. Below is an example of the osage + iron dye on some wool yarn vs. on cotton sashiko thread.

I learned so much from these dye experiments and I'm excited to add some swatches to my swatch book. You can read about my first experiment dying with avocados here. I used the fabric from that dye bath to make this outfit here.